Hello everyone,
CONTRIBUTING.md now follows the June conversation on this list — the rules from "The Next Release Is Within Reach" on 16 June, with the condition I added the next morning after the one objection. It also says what the GitHub ruleset really enforces, and on whom.
https://github.com/xymon-monitoring/xymon/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md
It is there because nobody objected in June, not because anyone agreed — say if you disagree and I will change it.
The backlog, measured: 53 ready for review (79 open, 26 of them drafts), median 20 days since being marked ready. Nothing is abandoned — none untouched for a fortnight — because I keep rebasing them. And the rate was never the problem: 60 merged between 9 August and 3 September, 51 of them with a review. Then it stopped. Nothing read or reviewed since 30 August, nothing merged since 3 September.
To resolve this I propose to add a delay before bypassing a PR:
- documentation, tests — 1 week (current 0 days)
- build and CI — 2 weeks (current 0 days)
- bug fixes — 1 month (current: never)
- everything else — 2 months (current: never)
The clock runs from when it was marked ready, and any review ends the wait — this is the fallback, not the path. Of the 53, 19 could go in today and the rest within two months with nobody doing anything.
The cost: two months means a feature can land unread. The bigger risk runs the other way — a project where finished work cannot move is one that stops.
None of it produces a reviewer or a contributor, and that is what we really need.
Let me know what you think!
Cheers
Bruno